


darling, I've wanted you for a lifetime

by seeyaloki



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Remembers, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 07:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19825144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeyaloki/pseuds/seeyaloki
Summary: In the museum, they call Steve Rogers his best friend, but he dreams of warm hands on his bare shoulders and cold lips on his neck and of feeling everything so vividly that it almost feels like mourning when he wakes up again.





	darling, I've wanted you for a lifetime

1.

He dreams in black and white.

He dreams of old skyscrapers and old cars and New York City clouded up by the steam of docking ships and the smoke of factories. He dreams of a man, fragile but sharp, and he dreams of laughter and of memories that don't feel like his. He dreams for the first time in what feels like decades, and when he wakes up, his hands are shaking like he's aching to touch something, anything, just to feel the energy, to let him know he's still breathing. Broken and torn but breathing, and maybe even a little bit more free than before. 

2.

The first night, he thinks about going back. He thinks about finding any HYDRA soldier anywhere, he thinks about strapping himself to that chair and wiping his memory clean because silence, at least, he knows and he longs for. But then he thinks of pulling the man from the water and not being sure why he did but being sure that he had to. And he thinks of going to sleep in 1991 and waking up a decade later and he thinks of how the one thing HYDRA never gave him was time and how much he wants it now that he can feel the taste of it on his tongue. 

So he doesn't go back. Instead he finds a place to hide and rest and dream of a man he knows but doesn't and he's tired and angry and feels so robbed of all the things that should've belonged to him but never really did once HYDRA got their hands on them. Things like the memories that haunt his mind, of a face that looks like his own but he can't possibly imagine ever having seen in a mirror. It scares him, this knowing there's a life that he lived and not knowing where he left it after they turned him into this weapon. And it takes him four days, the time it takes for his broken bones to right themselves again, before he realizes the only way he could ever find answers is to start with the man he couldn't kill and couldn't even let die, orders be damned. 

In the museum, he finds out just how much time they've taken from him. He finds out that he died, even though they didn't really let him, and he finds out why he can't get this man's face, voice, blood, out of his head. Seeing himself on that display, another man in another time, breaks his heart in a way he didn't even know it could. Like he let this man's life be stolen and be robbed of his time and they only ever used it to create a monster, a weapon in the hands of men whose only dream was to destroy. 

He leaves the museum feeling like a robber, putting a cold hand on his face and trying to map out the lines of an existence that was undone somewhere in the cold snow during the only war he can't remember. He looks around the city and it feels like an enemy. So he leaves and keeps going and going until the sun comes up in another world and he feels the comforting burn of running so far he wouldn't even find himself. 

(In the museum, they call Steve Rogers his best friend, but he dreams of warm hands on his bare shoulders and cold lips on his neck and of feeling everything so vividly that it almost feels like mourning when he wakes up again.) 

3.

He writes down everything as he remembers it, every dream he has of blond hair and blue eyes and of loving and he pieces them together, every detail lined up and it almost makes him want to be found just so he can look at Steve again and know for sure that it's been him, this lifetime ago, who's always known who he is. Bucky or James or Sergeant or Soldier, always able to look behind the mask and recognize it in his eyes. The only man alive who knew his name when he didn't even know it himself. 

But he wants to know everything, because he only remembers fragments of what it feels like to love him, really love him in the way he knows he did. He remembers watching blue lips on that riverbank, waiting for breath and the sound of a heartbeat loud in his ear and he wonders if that was maybe the first part of it, the reason why he knows for sure that if that breathe didn't come, he never would've left that river. Till the end of the line Steve said, and he knew what it meant, even when he didn't yet. 

4\. 

Romania isn't freezing, but it's cold enough that his bones feel at home in this place, like maybe they could be at rest and grow older and wearier but less broken with each passing day. He knows it can't last forever, it's been too calm for too long, and peace isn't something that ever really belonged to him. 

So when the day comes, it brings Steve Rogers. 

He lies badly and he forgets Steve knows him even though it's been so long that Bucky Barnes should've been nothing to him but a forgotten page in the history books by now. 

For a second he considers saying run with me and never look back, I want to remember everything there is to know about you. But time always catches up with you whether you run from it or not, and he will never be done paying for his sins. So instead, he runs into a war again and he hates how easy the anger comes to him again, but he looks to his left and Steve is angry too and he wants to know how long, how long Steve has hated the world for turning without him awake to watch it happen. So he leaps from staircase to staircase and pretends he's running from Steve as well even though he wants nothing more than to follow him, anywhere, into the jaws of death if that's what it takes to take back the time and rest stolen from them. 

He leaps from a building into another war, but Steve is behind him, and when this is done, whether he wins or loses, he will think of a man fragile yet sharp, and recognize his face and remember his name. 

5.

He mourns for a lifetime taken from him, but he raises his fists for something he actually believes in and for a man he's starting to know again and these days, when he dreams, he dreams in color.


End file.
